Michel Houellebecq, the Cassandra of Freedom PDF Download

Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004498133
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
When fiction and reality meet: Probably no contemporary novel has shaped reality as powerfully Houellebeck’s Submission. No previous analysis of Submission is as deep and encompassing as this volume written by experts on politics and literature

Author: Charles Forsdick
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 1789622719
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 472

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Book Description
The contributors to Transnational French Studies situate this disciplinary subfield of Modern Languages in actively transnational frameworks. The key objective of the volume is to define the core set of skills and methodologies that constitute the study of French culture as a transnational, transcultural and translingual phenomenon. Written by leading scholars within the field, chapters demonstrate the type of inquiry that can be pursued into the transnational realities – both material and non-material – that are integral to what is referred to as French culture. The book considers the transnational dimensions of being human in the world by focussing on four key practices which constitute the object of study for students of French: language and multilingualism; the construction of transcultural places and the corresponding sense of space; the experience of time; and transnational subjectivities. The underlying premise of the volume is that the transnational is present (and has long been present) throughout what we define as French history and culture. Chapters address instances and phenomena associated with the transnational, from prehistory to the present, opening up the geopolitical map of French studies beyond France and including sites where communities identified as French have formed.

Author: Michèle Lowrie
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009034650
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 383

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Can civil war ever be overcome? Can a better order come into being? This book explores how the Roman civil wars of the first century BCE laid the template for addressing perennially urgent questions. The Roman Republic's collapse and Augustus' new Empire have remained ideological battlegrounds to this day. Integrative and disintegrative readings begun in antiquity (Vergil and Lucan) have left their mark on answers given by Christians (Augustine), secular republicans (Victor Hugo), and disillusioned satirists (Michel Houellebecq) alike. France's self-understanding as a new Rome – republican during the Revolution, imperial under successive Napoleons – makes it a special case in the Roman tradition. The same story returns repeatedly. A golden age of restoration glimmers on the horizon, but comes in the guise of a decadent, oriental empire that reintroduces and exposes everything already wrong under the defunct republic. Central to the price of social order is patriarchy's need to subjugate women.

Author: Tamir Bar-On
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1793635838
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Studies of the right and radical right have proliferated since the rise of European nationalist and populist parties in the 1980s. Yet, the literature on the right and the radical right has a largely Euro-American bias and has been limited by partisan academics that focus on the left. The Right and Radical Right in the Americas hopes to be a pioneering work that examines the history and contemporary manifestations of the right and radical right throughout the Americas. From interwar Canada to contemporary Chile, the right and radical right have come in diverse ideological currents. Those ideological currents have undergone historical changes and the strategies of the right and radical right need to be contextualized in respect of country and region. The right and radical right also have distinctive meanings throughout the Americas and in different epochs.

Author: Louis Betty
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271078073
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 157

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Book Description
Michel Houellebecq is France’s most famous and controversial living novelist. Since his first novel in 1994, Houellebecq’s work has been called pornographic, racist, sexist, Islamophobic, and vulgar. His caricature appeared on the cover of the French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo on January 7, 2015, the day that Islamist militants killed twelve people in an attack on their offices and also the day that his most recent novel, Soumission—the story of France in 2022 under a Muslim president—appeared in bookstores. Without God uses religion as a lens to examine how Houellebecq gives voice to the underside of the progressive ethos that has animated French and Western social, political, and religious thought since the 1960s. Focusing on Houellebecq’s complicated relationship with religion, Louis Betty shows that the novelist, who is at best agnostic, “is a deeply and unavoidably religious writer.” In exploring the religious, theological, and philosophical aspects of Houellebecq’s work, Betty situates the author within the broader context of a French and Anglo-American history of ideas—ideas such as utopian socialism, the sociology of secularization, and quantum physics. Materialism, Betty contends, is the true destroyer of human intimacy and spirituality in Houellebecq’s work; the prevailing worldview it conveys is one of nihilism and hedonism in a postmodern, post-Christian Europe. In Betty’s analysis, “materialist horror” emerges as a philosophical and aesthetic concept that describes and amplifies contemporary moral and social decadence in Houellebecq’s fiction.

Author: Michel Houellebecq
Publisher: Profile Books
ISBN: 1847651615
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 161

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Book Description
Just thirty, with a well-paid job, no love life and a terrible attitude, the anti-hero of this grim, funny novel smokes four packs of cigarettes a day and writes weird animal stories in his spare time. A computer programmer by day, he is tolerably content, until he's packed off with a colleague - the sexually-frustrated Raphael Tisserand - to train provincial civil servants in the use of a new computer system Houellebecq's first novel was a smash hit in France, expressing the misanthropic voice of a generation. Like A Confederacy of Dunces, Houellebecq's bitter, sarcastic and exasperated narrator vociferously expresses his frustration and disgust with the world.

Author: Michel Houellebecq
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374714487
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
A controversial, intelligent, and mordantly funny new novel from France's most famous literary figure Paris, 2022. François is bored. He's a middle-aged lecturer at the Sorbonne and an expert on J. K. Huysmans, the famous nineteenth-century "decadent" author. But François's own decadence is considerably smaller in scale. He sleeps with his students, eats microwave dinners, reads the classics, queues up YouPorn. Meanwhile, it's election season. And although Francois feels "about as politicized as a hand towel," things are getting pretty interesting. In an alliance with the socialists, France's new Islamic party sweeps to power. Islamic law comes into force. Women are veiled, polygamy is encouraged, and Francois is offered an irresistible academic advancement--on condition that he convert to Islam. Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker has said of this novel that "Houellebecq is not merely a satirist but--more unusually--a sincere satirist, genuinely saddened by the absurdities of history and the madnesses of mankind." Michel Houellebecq's Submission may be satirical and melancholic, but it is also hilarious; a comic masterpiece by one of France's great novelists.

Author: Michel Houellebecq
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374721688
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
Michel Houellebecq’s Serotonin is a caustic, frightening, hilarious, raunchy, offensive, and politically incorrect novel about the decline of Europe, Western civilization, and humanity in general. Deeply depressed by his romantic and professional failures, the aging hedonist and agricultural engineer Florent-Claude Labrouste feels he is “dying of sadness.” He hates his young girlfriend, and the feeling is almost certainly mutual; his career is pretty much over; and he has to keep himself thoroughly medicated to cope with day-to-day life. Suffocating in the rampant loneliness, consumerism, hedonism, and sprawl of the city, Labrouste decides to head for the hills, returning to Normandy, where he once worked promoting regional cheeses and where he was once in love, and even—it now seems—happy. There he finds a countryside devastated by globalization and by European agricultural policies, and encounters farmers longing, like Labrouste himself, for an impossible return to a simpler age. As the farmers prepare for what might be an armed insurrection, it becomes clear that the health of one miserable body and of a suffering body politic are not so different, and that all parties may be rushing toward a catastrophe that a whole drugstore’s worth of antidepressants won’t make bearable.

Author: Michel Houellebecq
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1784702056
Category : France
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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As the 2022 French Presidential election looms, two candidates emerge as favourites: Marine Le Pen of the Front National, and the charismatic Muhammed Ben Abbes of the growing Muslim Fraternity. Forming a controversial alliance with the political left to block the Front National's alarming ascendency, Ben Abbes sweeps to power, and overnight the country is transformed. This proves to be the death knell of French secularism, as Islamic law comes into force: women are veiled, polygamy is encouraged and, for our narrator Fran�ois - misanthropic, middle-aged and alienated - life is set on a new course. Submission is a devastating satire, comic and melancholy by turns, and a profound meditation on faith and meaning in Western society.

Author: Michel Houellebecq
Publisher: Singel Uitgeverijen
ISBN: 9029587237
Category : Fiction
Languages : nl
Pages : 265

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Een twaalfjarige jongen klimt in de bergen in een elektriciteitsmast, helemaal tot op het platform. De gapende leegte onder zijn voeten oefent een vreemde aantrekkingskracht op hem uit: zal hij springen? Dertig jaar later moet hij terugdenken aan dat ene moment. Hij heeft de liefde van zijn leven gevonden en zijn eigen economische waarde opgeschroefd door een nieuwe vorm van toerisme te lanceren, maar hoe stabiel is geluk? Met Platform houdt Michel Houellebecq de moderne westerse samenleving opnieuw een spiegel voor, waarin enkele minder aangename details van onze wereld van markt en strijd worden uitvergroot en vervormd. Michel Houellebecq (1958) is het even verguisde als bewierookte paradepaard van de Franse letteren. Vooral met zijn grote romans en de daarin verwoorde (vaak tegenstrijdige) opvattingen verwierf hij mondiale literaire bekendheid. Sinds 1998 leeft hij in zelfverkozen ballingschap in Ierland.